Chapter 16 – Advancement

Callum toyed with the key fob he’d put the glamour focus into, marveling at how much smaller it was when done by machine rather than hand. He had ended up buying some cooking and electronics supplies to actually get the paste into place and tamp it down or pick it out, depending on how well he managed the enchanting. Fortunately with the pattern already in place there wasn’t all that much he could mess up, so it hadn’t taken him too many tries.

He was pretty sure he had messed up with his timing. In order to help figure out what was going on with the teleportation enchantments he’d staked out the teleporter that Gayle used and had arrived three hours earlier than their intended meeting time. He didn’t know how prompt Gayle was, or whether she did anything else while she was in town, so he’d erred on the side of caution.

The problem was that three hours was a very, very long time to wait and stare at a single point. Even if he could close his eyes, it was still tedious and boring and closing his eyes just meant that he wanted to nap. Trying to read or study was a problem in a different way because then he didn’t focus on the teleporter.

Time crept by very, very slowly. To fill the dead space, Callum did some basic exercises, trying to keep himself from going soft, but even that wasn’t something he could keep up the whole time. Callum kept catching his attention wandering and snapped it back to the teleporter, and after the thirteenth or fourteenth time he decided he’d never be a good guard. It was closing on two and a half hours watching from the roof of a nearby building when he finally noticed a flare of magic. The mana passing through the enchantment defined a cylinder, and pulsed maybe a dozen times over two or three seconds.

A moment after that it flickered, and Gayle appeared in the circle. Callum was fairly certain it wasn’t the one-way teleportation; it looked more like the swap than it did the simpler formation. It definitely was not a portal, but he’d already figured that much. Unfortunately, since it was practically impossible to look inside an enchantment, he couldn’t tell what bits did what. Of course, it was also the receiver, so hopefully when Gayle went back he’d get a better idea.

He could easily have followed Gayle to the library, given how completely blind she was in magical terms, but that would have just made him feel like a weird stalker. While he might live outside magical law, there were some pretty severe limits on what he would let himself do. Creeping on young girls was definitely out of bounds. Even if Gayle was probably only five years younger than him, he still couldn’t think of her as anything but a kid.

Callum waited a good twenty minutes before following after her, doublechecking to make sure he had his reference notes with him. The main sticking points for Gayle’s ability to opt out of apprenticeship were communication, movement and shielding. While it made sense that any mature mage would have a focus or native ability to do all the tricks on the list, it was obviously never meant to be possible.

Some types had it easy with a few of the requirements. All of the elements could attack, but only air had any real communication ability native to it, and getting movement abilities out of the elements required a lot of control and power. For shields, he didn’t know if the healing aspect had any options at all. Fulfilling all the criteria with shaping mana, homemade foci, and the limits of vis pretty much required an older mage helping. Which was already the definition of apprenticeship.

Fortunately for Gayle, she had a cheat in the form of Callum. He’d actually chewed over whether he wanted to keep the collaboration going, now that he had access to literature, but he didn’t feel right just abandoning her to own devices. Not while they still hadn’t wrapped up her own issues. Besides, not only was there nothing to connect Professor Brown with the vampire killer GAR was chasing hundreds of miles away, but he also was learning a lot from watching Gayle work.

As usual, books could only teach so much. There were some articulations of the way that vis behaved, not quite like a fluid and not quite like a gas and, when enchanting, not quite like a solid, but none of those descriptions were anything like seeing it for himself. Whatever shortcomings she might have, Gayle absolutely had control of energies to a degree that Callum envied.

It wasn’t exactly a finesse, since he was pretty sure he could sense more finely than she could, it was just practice. After another few years he might have the offhand precision that she did, but considering that he didn’t have any real drills or even a proper coach he might never get it. With all the will in the world, someone couldn’t learn everything on their own.

He strolled into the bookstore at the usual time, finding nobody around save Gayle, not even the Larsons. Which was odd, since he would have thought that they’d at least have someone manning the counter, but there might well be a glamour to keep people away. So far he still couldn’t actually see them.

“So did you get anything better than kinesis?” Gayle looked hopeful, but Callum shook his head.

“Since you can only use healing vis or mana, you’re stuck with what mana can do. So mostly just glorified kinesis. I don’t suppose you’re hiding a second aspect somewhere.”

“Oh, I wish! It would be so much easier if I had fire or wind or something.” Gayle snapped her fingers. “Boom! Half of the requirements done.”

“Then I guess we’ll have to focus on the mana-based options. At least the requirement isn’t that it’s a good movement magic. Because frankly, it’s going to be terrible.”

“Aww.” Gayle pouted. “I guess I’ll have to buy something to let me fly when I get my full mage credentials.” Callum almost asked her what she thought of the limitations before he checked himself. He really didn’t need to try and convince Gayle he was some kind of rogue mage by criticizing the status quo.

“Yeah, for now, there’s just the low-grade levitation.”

“Hey, you’re a gravity mage,” Gayle said, narrowing her eyes. “You can already do travel can’t you?”

“It’s less useful than you’d think, but yes,” he told her.

“Can I see?”

“I suppose,” Callum sighed. He figured he’d have to demonstrate something at some point, so he had been prepared for it. Fortunately he could do a short demonstration without the inertialess spatial movement, just by changing the gravity affecting his chair.

He concentrated and wrapped his magic around the seat, altering the spatial angles until it started floating upward, then he tweaked it to go a little sideways before lowering the power so he wouldn’t bump into the ceiling. He felt absolutely precarious perched on the chair, and not a little silly. A floating wicker chair was kind of ludicrous.

“Oh, neat!” Gayle clearly had a different opinion of it than he did. “I can’t wait ‘til I can do that! Even if it’s bad, it’s still flying! C’mon, let’s get started.”

Callum lowered himself back down, carefully, and manually readjusted the chair before taking out the brass plates. He’d noticed that Gayle had never offered to bring any of her own, and didn’t question the fact that he kept supplying them. It was pretty usual behavior for trust-fund college students, or whatever the equivalent was. It was amazing how blind people could be to how much was provided for them.

While Gayle had to work from scratch, Callum had done a little bit of practice on his own so he wouldn’t look quite so foolish when it came to a much more complicated focus than anything they’d done before. He didn’t technically need it, since he had his own version of telekinesis and, of course, far better travel, but it wouldn’t hurt to have more tools. Besides, it wasn’t just a version of telekinesis with higher power limits; there were some flourishes that he wanted to take a look at.

Once again it reminded him of how far behind he was when it came to magic. Calling himself a professor felt overly optimistic even if he wasn’t pretending to be a professor of magic, just because of how lost he was most of the time. Still, Gayle didn’t seem to be too worried about his skills or lack thereof, so long as he was supplying information.

When they finished the focus, Callum found that it took basically all his effort to use it to levitate himself, but Gayle seemed to have no issues. It was pretty humbling to see the difference in their magical oomph, at least when it came to mana manipulation. He’d thought he was doing fairly well on the magical stamina front, but apparently not.

It made him wonder what trained spatial mages could do. Probably massive portals and teleports; he’d have an issue teleporting more than a few people, or generating portals larger than a few feet in diameter. Moving entire convoys or even buildings was far, far beyond him, but maybe not to a real mage. Not that he wanted to move all that. Just moving himself was enough.

He made sure to leave before Gayle, giving himself time to make his way back to the GAR teleporter and set up his notepad. Unfortunately, it seemed that he’d been too conservative again because it was well over an hour before she actually made it back to the teleporter, walking into the office building and making her way over to where the enchantment was inscribed. It was worth the wait.

First, when she pushed mana into the acceptor portion, there was feedback. A complex loop of mana or artificial vis came out and wrapped about her wrist, where her mage tattoo was, before withdrawing. Callum scowled at that, but he wasn’t surprised. If everyone had the tattoos, it made sense they were used as a security measure of some sort. His probably wouldn’t work, because he definitely wasn’t cleared to use them and he’d messed with his anyway.

There was a pause as essentially nothing happened, just some small fluctuations near a particular portion of the enchantment. It was too subtle for Callum to tell what was going on, but he assumed it was some kind of check or security feature or safety feature, mirroring the pulses he’d seen when Gayle arrived. Then a spatial field unfolded from one section of the enchantment, buried underneath the floor, creating the exact same field that he’d seen when she had teleported in.

It flashed, and Gayle was gone. Callum frowned. Perhaps he’d been hasty in judging things, because the very end was somewhat less useful than he would have liked, even if it did go to show that most of the enchantment was there for reasons other than actually forming the teleport. With all the enchantment complexity he thought there’d be some meshing from the multiple output portions, but there wasn’t. It was just one piece.

That was good and bad. It meant that most of what was going on had to do with the teleportation network rather than the teleportation. He was trying to study a car to learn how internal combustion worked, when all he really wanted was an engine. So in theory what he wanted was much easier than what he saw, but it was also completely obscured by what he saw.

Callum closed his eyes and focused on feeling the outlines of the enchanted portions with his senses. Now that he knew where to look, he could see that bit of it was actually discrete from the rest. Or rather, there were three parts total. One was the circle, which served to define the framework of where the enchantment went. Then there were the complex pseudo-circuits that controlled everything. What he wanted was a small cylinder directly underneath the circle.

He thought very seriously about just stealing it, but decided if he was going to do that, it would have to be from a different teleporter a long distance away. Besides, stealing something that could let people teleport to it was likely an extremely bad idea. The problem was he really needed to see both sides of it, and considering the tattoo security he was even less interested in taking a trip to the other side.

Grumbling to himself, he teleport-hopped back to his motorhome and busied himself with dinner while he considered options. No matter what he did, he’d be tipping his hand a little bit, and he still wasn’t entirely sure about Harry and Lucy. A thought occurred to him while he was reheating stew in the microwave and he paused to chew it over.

Gayle was obviously very well-to-do, and if the part of the enchantment responsible for actually teleporting was as small as it seemed, portable teleports were probably something that existed. Obviously they’d be restricted to the rich and powerful, though considering that mages generally were rich and powerful it’d be only a truly elite cadre that had them.

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It was an assumption on his part but he might be able to ask, circumspectly, about it. A portable teleport probably wouldn’t count for Gayle’s movement magic unless she made it herself, which she obviously couldn’t do, but she might know where one was. Otherwise, he’d have to go through Lucy or Harry to see if they had access to one, or records of a defunct teleporter.

Really, the problem was that it was hard to ask after it without tipping his hand too much. Though, teleportation enchantments were probably handy enough that anyone could be excused for wanting to get their hands on one. He’d have to wait until next week for that, but it wasn’t like he didn’t have his hands full already.

With some disgruntlement he went back to studying and sketching out more to-do foci. One was actually an advanced telekinesis focus, because there were certain limitations to the one he had. Mostly, he couldn’t fling anything with it, which was a sad state of affairs. Once he had better control over his vis he could probably gravity-launch things, but he wasn’t there yet. Not nearly.

There were a few other common utility foci that any mage would have lying around. A cantrip that would essentially clean anything that wasn’t too soiled, basically a magical stain remover, was fantastic and incredibly intricate. Apparently for fae or water-type mages it was extremely easy, but for anyone who was restricted to using mana it took some doing to keep the spellwork from damaging the article in question. There was even a version that a mage could use on himself, which was high on his list of acquisitions.